Translation Strategies Of Cultural Presupposition Under The Direction Of Relevance Theory

Cultural presupposition is not new to the linguistic field as well as the translation field. It has caused heated discussion since its appearance. Cultural presupposition refers to the culturally hidden hypothesis, beliefs and views which do not need explaining. In others words, it refers to different cultural background knowledge of speaker and hearer or a system of cultural-specific beliefs built upon and developed through the life experience of members of different communities. Cultural presupposition will inevitably leads to mistranslation, under translation and over translation.In the contemporary world, with the development of international communication and exchange, cultural elements have became a very important factor which exert great influence on translation, especially since the cultural turn in translation studies, cultural elements functions as one of the most important part in translation. Correctly handling cultural presupposition can not only shorten the distance between two distinct languages but can remove the barrier caused by insufficient understanding as well. However in the practical translation practice, translators who are from different cultural background will inevitably understand or translate the same cultural phenomenon with their own group or social awareness. Admittedly scholars at home and aboard attach importance to this topic, mental space theory, cognitive point theory and other cognitive theories also have demonstrated certain explainationary force; however more attention should be given to how to translate cultural presupposition.In order to present a successful translation and better convey the exotic culture, translator are needed to better understand the similarities and differences of the two cultures involved, thus they can better convey the message and intention in the original text to the target reader to meet their cognitive expectations. Therefore, how to understand and how to translate cultural presupposition becomes a problem calling for great attention.The thesis intends to discuss the translation strategies of cultural presupposition under the direction of relevance theory and to provider a new perspective to understand cultural presupposition. As for the theoretic part, relevance theory is a cognitive theory and at the same times a communicational one. Relevance theory is introduced to translation circles not only because it is powerful in accounting for translation and offer a feasible and convincing approach to translation but because it provides a unified theoretical framework for translation as well. Relevance theory views translation as an ostensive-inferential process, during such process the action of three parts are involved, namely, the author, the translator and the target reader. The subsystems of relevance theory such as ostensive-inferential process, contextual effect and relevance expectation better demonstrate the dynamicity of cultural presupposition, thereby offering a direction for failure in cultural presupposition. The thesis will try to explain the failure in cultural presupposition from the perspective of relevance theory and attempts to find out effective translation strategies according to the optimal relevance.